Make your own Free passport photos

We are in the process of renewing our visas here in the UK and I had my passport photograph taken at a photobooth at the nearby Tesco. Unfortunately when we showed it to the immigration officer who had come along to the University to check the documents, he rejected my photograph saying that I was too near the camera. I simply couldn't believe it - I took my picture at a photobooth with my wife and her photograph was accepted. Does that mean my head is too big - £5 down the drain.

Online Shopping Search + wiki = ShopWiki

ShopWiki is an online shopping search engine combined with a wiki contributed by consumers.

Normally if I were looking for a product, say a perfume, I would do a search on Google, read reviews on various sites and then compare prices offered on various e-commerce sites. Searching for Perfumes on ShopWiki gives me a list of the best new releases (including some that are not in the market as yet). Apparently ShopWiki actively crawls more than 180,000 online stores.

Searching for the right search engine optimization services

I have been dabbling in search engine optimisation or SEO as it is popularly known, as a hobby for several years now. I did win a few SEO contests and some offers did come my way. To tell the truth, I have often thought of professionally offering search engine optimization services. However, I never did purely due to the fact that it's simply a hobby for me and if I did take up an offer, I would have had to deliver to my clients. There is a huge difference between an amateur who does it as a hobby and a company with huge resources under their disposal and wide experience. It is also worth looking at a local company. So how do you know whether a company is good?

Get Cash back on your online shopping

One of my geeky friends recently introduced me to Quidco, a cashback site that helps you get money back on your online purchases. It's very simple - Quidco pays you the commissions that they receives for your transactions from merchants listed on their site.

The list includes some of my popular online stores including Tesco.com, Dell, iTunes, Marks & Spencer, etc. My power company (Scottish power) and even hotels (Travelodge).

They will transfer your earnings to your PayPal or BACs account.

It is totally free to join and they just take an annual £5 subscription from your Quidco earnings (not charged).

Wish I had known about this earlier. I could have got some money back from all my online transactions.

Opening up the Samsung Galaxy Portal

I have a love hate relationship with my Samsung Galaxy Portal. I love the Android apps, the quality of the pics taken during good light conditions and all the features but I hate the battery life, the fact the camera does not have a flash and the poor GPS reception.

Quite recently I had the scare of my life when I found my son for reasons best known to him, dripping milk onto the back of my mobile. I quickly shut it off, removed the battery and tried to dry the milk that had seeped in as best as I could. I gave it a whole day and used my old SonyEricssion K770i as a backup in the meantime.



With a prayer on my lip, I started the phone and it worked. However, I realised that the phone was not responding to the touch screen and the buttons in the front.

It looked like my phone was a write off but I was not willing to give up.

I decided to open it up and do a deep cleaning inside. I tried searching everywhere on the web but there were no tutorials on how to open up the phone but I still decided to go ahead.

There were only 7 screws and I had to carefully pry the cover open and I had access to the mother board. however, I didn't even try to open up the touch screen. Took some Johnson & Johnson cotton buds and cleaned up as well as I could.





After several minutes I put everything back again and started the phone.

It works perfectly.